David Bennato, Manolo Farci, John Fiorentino
Guerini Scientifica, 2023.
pp. 211
This book was born from a series of seminars – to be precise, two meetings, held online in 2022 – and takes up in its title the General mediology course by Régis Debray (1991): the three curators, together with Giovanni Ragone, who sign the Premise , Introduction, they are keen to point out that this is not a instant books and that the word mediology, and not media, was chosen precisely to assign a precise meaning to the content of these pages.
What is the meaning of this? We can recall here the idea that the media are not only means of communication but are themselves communication and producers of sense making: they contribute to building worldviews and the culture or perception of the population, they enable ideas to have strength and to shape society in a certain sense. Therefore, mediology – despite the fact that Treccani describes it as “the study of the mass media” and “the same as mass media studies” – it does not coincide with the study of mass media and it is not the analysis of the containers within which the contents are transmitted, taking into consideration the genesis of messages and the way in which they are absorbed and lived by people. Here are the references to processes rather than objects, symbols rather than the means, and also the institutions who in all of this act as producers and directors of meaning.
Thus, the twenty-nine words that make up the text refer to different dimensions that all revolve around a necessity, well expressed by the following sentence: "while the spectacle of war unfolds, one cannot stop thinking" (p. 19).
The reader will surely be attracted by the chapter entitled Weapons (signed by Tiziana Migliore) in which attention is focused on narration built around the tools of defense and offense in the context of a war "immediately transfigured into an archetypal narrative that refers to the clash between good and evil" (p. 45), as can be read in the chapter onAuthenticity by Manolo Farci. But also the pages that deal with the digital war, the cyber war, the use of sophisticated instruments and the elaborate propaganda approaches are fascinating given that these are issues read and discussed by an original and little frequented summit. Perhaps it would have been appropriate to dedicate a specific chapter to the psychological warfare (often today reductively referred to as cognitive war), but it is also true that several explicit and, more often, implicit indications to psychological warfare are contained in chapters dedicated to narratives, reconstructions, information management – however it does not seem to me that the theme of infodemic has found a suitable place.
Faced with a war fought half as if we were back in the trenches of the First World War and the other half projected into the future with drones, electronic warfare and killer robots, in the chapter entitled Humanity, recalling the work of Susan Sontag In the face of the pain of others, Antonio Rafele asks himself whether “this word is still relevant when faced with images of war” (p. 183): a central question that introduces the reader to the two final chapters that address the following two themes: Z (signed by Giovanni Boccia Artieri) and Zelensky (Vincenzo Susca).
In this scenario, the role of journalism has also changed a lot and Carlo Sorrentino asks himself, in the chapter Journalism, “what are the specificities of war journalism in the era of digital communication, which has made the boundaries between sources, journalists and the public much more blurred” (p. 103).
The chapters are interesting Enemy (Emiliana DeBlasio), Storytelling (Federico Montanari) and, of course, Propaganda (Fausto Colombo), which refers to the book by Philip M. Taylor, with its more than three hundred and fifty pages, entitled Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Era (Manchester University Press. 2003rd edition, XNUMX).
But “where is the war? For us viewers, the war is mainly on TV. On good, dear, old generalist television. What we see are the reports made by the correspondents of the generalist networks” (p. 166) and so the faces and places associated with the reports remain imprinted: it is the telewar (chapter by Stefano Cristante) somehow associated with the emergence of TikTok, about which Ilenia Colonna writes, recalling that this platform not only made young soldiers visible, but implemented the so-called Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), “that is, the collection of intelligence information through open sources accessible to anyone” (p. 174). In this vein, it is also worth mentioning the attention given to memetic warfare (chapter by Emiliano Chirchiano): “the memes that, since the beginning of the conflict, have fed the channels of memetic warfare “Ukraine can be divided into three strands: highlighting the heroism of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians fighting on the front lines to boost the country’s morale; deriding Russian troops for their ineptitude and vilifying their president, Vladimir Putin; and criticizing Western inaction, particularly that of the United Nations and NATO” (p. 118).
One could conclude by saying that this book deals with an important modality of construction & deconstruction of (multiple) realities. A phenomenon that this war of aggression by Russia against Ukraine has clearly highlighted since the first propaganda hints that have previously introdotto, so to speak, the real war.
Andrea Castiello d'Antonio
